I wanted to open this week’s discussion by thanking those who responded to last week’s. The general consensus was (I received about 7 responses) that the material thus far has been difficult, but that as it’s coming to an end, and issues of hashgahah, providence, are really very important, we should continue on our way. I appreciate the feedback and would love to receive more in the future.

A DIFFICULT CHAPTER AND ITS REWARDS

Reading this chapter of the Moreh inside is fairly difficult. At the beginning, Rambam poses an interesting question, why it is that Yehezqel specified the time and place when he had these visions. We’ll return to the rest of that paragraph later, but I just want to mention now that Rambam never explicitly answers the question. Rather, he moves on to several other discussions of the vision, punctuating each of his points with the words "Understand this," which generally means that he has not explicitly said his main point, but wants you to deduce it from what he has said.

He closes the chapter by saying that he has now completed his discussion of matters of Ma`aseh Merkavah and that nowhere after this point will he return to these issues. At the very least, then, we know that this is as far as we will go with our contemplation of the visions of God, and what they mean, which I believe will be a relief to those who have found these musings unfruitful.

AN UNANSWERED QUESTION?

Since I do not believe that Rambam would just ask a question and ignore it, I think that the rest of the chapter, without specifically referring back to the beginning, nevertheless answers that first question—why did Yehezqel connect his vision to a time and place. He is not, after all, a newspaper reporter. [From a modern perspective, since we believe that space and time condition all human experience, we could have just answered that Yehezqel was trying to qualify his presentation by saying "this is what I saw at this time and place," so that we wouldn’t mistake it for an absolute vision or truth. Just like one cannot dip in the same river twice, because it is constantly changing, one cannot view God the same way twice. To explain his vision, then, Yehezqel told us where and when it happened. Rambam, however, clearly doesn’t believe that, first because he doesn’t think there’s any change in the vision of God, except from a human perspective, and second because he’s already told us that Yehezqel thinks the two visions, at the river Kevar and in Jerusalem, were the same.]

THE MESSAGE OF THE WORD "DEMUT"

The first of the paragraphs draws our attention to the appearance of the work "likeness or demut" in Yehezqel’s visions, for the hayyot, the firmament, the kisei, the throne, and the demut adam, the appearance of a man sitting on the throne. For the ophanim, however, and also for the firmament in the 2nd vision (ch.10), Yehezqel omits the word likeness, meaning that he saw them exactly rather than approximately.

Two points here: first, Rambam starts off the paragraph by saying "though this whole description is based indubitably on a vision of prophecy…there is between various parts… a very great difference in expression." I believe he is saying that the word likeness indicates a piece of the vision that the prophet had a particularly difficult time apprehending, and did not fully come to understand. Thus, even though the whole thing is within a vision, and therefore somewhat unclear, these parts were particularly so. The ophanim which are, after all, part of the Earth, were not nearly so difficult to envision as the hayyot.

If that’s correct, by the way, it suggests that by the time of the 2nd vision, Yehezqel had developed his ability to perceive the firmament in a vision, because he no longer needs the word demut to describe his vision. This whole paragraph, then, suggests (if I read it correctly) that even a prophet has more and less clear parts of a prophecy, and that the clarity of his vision can change over time—Yehezqel originally could not see the firmament clearly, but later he could. Understand this [ I don’t mean that, I just think it’s cool to append to a writing, as if there is much deeper information here for those who delve into it].

THE CHANGING VISION OF THE KERUVIM

The second paragraph notes a change in his description of the keruvim from the 1st to the second vision, regarding their hands and wings. Rambam seems to be pointing out that in the first vision, Yehezqel simply notes that they had both, whereas in the second, he knows more about their placement—their wings were more visible, and the exact function of the man’s hand was not, since he uses the term tavnit, which is like demut. Here again, I believe, he is showing a change (and growth) in Yehezqel’s ability to perceive the Merkavah.

THE UPPER PARTS OF THE MERKAVAH

In the third group of "Understand this" information, Rambam points out that Yehezqel’s mention of the hashmal and the rainbow describes the glory of the Lord (which is not, as Rambam notes, the Lord Himself). Rambam finds this metaphor particularly powerful, without explaining why (and do not intend to investigate that part of this chapter now). After praising it, though, Rambam says it is "indubitably due to a prophetic force," which I believe means that he wants us to know that Yehezqel did not achieve this vision on his own— a point we’ll come back to in a minute.

The last of these paragraphs focuses on the upper part of the Merkavah, noting that the gemara gives two readings of the word hashmal. In both—the first is that it combines the word hash as in rapidity with mal as in stopping (note that I’m relying on the Hebrew translation that has mal as hefseq, stopping. Pines has cutting, which I don’t understand at all); the second is that hash means silence and mal means speech —the two parts of the word represent contradictory impulses, meaning that the hashmal is a self-contradictory element. For Rambam, that proves that Yehezqel was not witnessing God Himself, but rather that he was witnessing a created thing—the kavod, or the Glory of God. This notion of the Glory of God is an ancient one; it means that God is so different from the world that He could not in any meaningful way communicate with that world. He therefore created a kavod, His Glory, which is able to bridge the gap. This bridge apparently has the self-contradictory qualities of hashmal (as well as the demut of a man in some way).

COULD LIGHT BE THE HASHMAL?

I don’t want to push the point too much, but reading Rambam and Hazal interpret the hashmal as self-contradictory (either by virtue of moving and stopping or speaking and falling silent) reminds me greatly of the notion of light functioning as both a wave and a particle—as both matter and non-matter. Again, I’ll have to study more physics before I can do more with this, but it feels like a productive avenue of thought.

That was the last of Rambam’s "Understand this" paragraphs, meaning that somewhere in them we should find the answer to his original question, why did Yehezqel attach his prophecy to a time and place? Before we answer, let’s just review the rest of that first paragraph. After the question, Rambam adds-- stressing that it is a matter of significance-- that the key to the whole issue is the phrase the heavens were opened. He says that phrase has a similar meaning to such other phrases in the Prophets and Psalms as Open ye the gates or Open to me the gates of righteousness, which, as Rambam notes, occurs frequently. How is this the key to the puzzle?

THE GIFT ELEMENT OF PROPHECY

I believe Rambam wishes to stress here that Yehezqel’s vision, for all that it involved an intellectual apprehension of the cosmos—the realization that matter is subordinate to the spheres, and so on—necessarily also involved inspiration. It was not true that Yehezqel could sit down and figure out the cosmos and Ma`aseh Merkavah; rather, at some point, a vision was provided to him that made these matters clear.

This explains everything in the chapter (I think). He gives a time and place because it was only there that he came to this realization—and he could not duplicate it at will, which is not true of intellectual accomplishments. Even after the vision at Kevar, he could not casually summon up a picture of the Merkavah. Rather, it was only at a particular other time and place that he again was granted a vision.

That his knowledge was granted from outside him is corroborated by his use of the term demut. If he was simply intellectualizing the whole thing, he would have no need to qualify the vision—this was his knowledge of each of these things. If, however, the vision was granted from outside of him, he needed to present it as it was granted him. That’s even more proved by the change in the clarity of the firmament. While Yehezqel may have grown to understand it better, that should not have completely removed the need for the qualifier demut—rather, it would seem that in the 2nd vision, he was granted a more clear understanding of the demut. This same logic applies to the hands/wings point that Rambam made, and Yehezqel’s ability to formulate the parable of the rainbow that impressed Rambam so. In each case, Yehezqel’s visions make clear to us that we cannot expect to reach these conclusions on our own, but only with the experience of a prophetic vision.

The last such paragraph, proving that the kavod is a created Being, also shows the need for a grant of such visions, since without them, people could not begin to fathom God or anything connected to Him. This chapter thus ends up answering a textual question with an important idea—we should not think that prophets "achieve" a vision of the Merkavah. While certainly they work on it, they only actually envision it correctly with the input of the opening of the gates of Heaven, with help from the celestial world, allowing man to see that which is Above.